David Arden, Keys to Achievement Foundation president, gives Donnie White, 7, instruction on using a keyboard and earphones attached to a computer to learn music in "Keys to Achievement," music training in computer lab for Jennifer Banks' kindergarten class at Bayside School. Event on 4/21/05 in Sausalito.
Darryl Bush / The Chronicle

Jumana Matlock, 5, reacts to her computer as she uses a keyboard and earphones attached to a computer to learn music in "Keys to Achievement," music training in computer lab for Jennifer Banks kindergarten class at Bayside School. Event on 4/21/05 in Sausalito.
Darryl Bush / The Chronicle

Photo: Darryl Bush

Jumana Matlock, 5, reacts to her computer as she uses a keyboard...

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Shawanna Blakemore, 6, uses a keyboard and earphones attached to a computer to learn music in "Keys to Achievement," music training in computer lab for Jennifer Banks' kindergarten class at Bayside School. In back is David Arden, Keys to Achievement Foundation president, giving Donnie White, 7, instruction. Event on 4/21/05 in Sausalito.
Darryl Bush / The Chronicle

Photo: Darryl Bush

Shawanna Blakemore, 6, uses a keyboard and earphones attached to a...

Computer program key in teaching music to kids / Sausalito composer, software company unite to bring lessons to school

A slight, bespectacled man knelt with his arm around kindergartner Sparkle Southern, whose brow creased as she watched a cartoon pelican flying across her computer screen.

"I think he wants you to play a high note. Let's listen," said composer and piano teacher David Arden, who goes to Bayside Elementary School in Sausalito every Tuesday and Thursday to shepherd Sparkle and her classmates through their piano lesson.

Not many kindergartens offer piano classes, and Arden comes to Bayside because he wants that to change. The school is testing a computerized piano- teaching program started by Arden at the school in March that he hopes will bring early music training to thousands of classes.

Using a smaller keyboard of 49 keys -- instead of the usual 88 -- plugged into a computer monitor, the 18 students progress at their own pace through 30-minute lessons twice a week -- enough, Arden said, to give them the benefits shown to accrue from music training.

Those benefits include improvements in spatial-temporal reasoning, pattern recognition and other skills crucial to learning math and science concepts, according to studies at McGill University in Montreal, Auburn University in Alabama, UCLA and others reported in journals such as Nature and Early Childhood Research Quarterly."My goal is not just that they get some exposure to music, but that they get some musical skills," Arden said. "And also some sparks, some joy from this."

Educators at Bayside say the program builds on their efforts in a school where 80 percent of children qualify for a free lunch. Test scores have risen dramatically in three years to put the school near statewide averages due to a renewed focus on reading and broad efforts to "create a culture of learning," said Rose Marie Roberson, Sausalito-Marin City School District superintendent.

"For abstract thinking and creativity, this has tremendous potential," Roberson said, adding that creative expression also has been shown to boost self-esteem.

"Music is another representational language, just like math, and it attaches to audio learning," said Margo Nanny, the district's curriculum and professional development coordinator. "It integrates a lot of things."

Arden, a Sausalito resident who runs the New School of Piano in San Francisco in addition to his recording and concert career, said his idea of using a computer program to teach music hatched in 1999 after he created a piano program for the Whitney Young Child Development Center in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point district.

Though successful, he said, it became obvious the program would outstrip the resources available to keep it going.

"The format of individual 15-minute private lessons was just not sustainable," Arden said.

Seeing "edutainment" software used by his nieces and nephews persuaded him that a computer program could teach piano to young children, so he created the Keys to Achievement Foundation to work on the project.

"It didn't take long to realize that it would take millions of dollars and really would not be feasible to maintain and revise the product," Arden said.

Instead, he teamed up with Canadian software developer Adventus Interactive, maker of the popular Piano Suite program, which also teaches music-reading and piano skills via a keyboard attached to a computer monitor.

In the partnership, Adventus owns the copyright for the program dubbed Children's Musical Journey and markets it to retailers, while Keys to Achievement can buy copies at a discount to benefit nonprofit groups.

"He had the strategy all worked out before he came to us," said James Mullen, president of Adventus. "We worked to create an engaging interactive world around that."

Though the Piano Suite program has been well received, Mullen said, younger children need "more of a Disney appearance" and careful sequencing of activities to engage them. Only the first year of the three-year program has been completed.

"We've found this is a new way to supplement private instruction as well as get quite a bit done in the classroom setting," Mullen said. "It's not a 'music lite' course."

Each lesson has five parts: a lesson introduced by a famous composer; a practice session; games to reinforce the lesson; an "improve room" for experimenting; and a library for review, listening to songs of the composers or hearing their own recordings.

They progress from recognizing high and low keys (represented by pelicans and whales, respectively) to seeing those sounds represented as notes and finally to reading notes on a staff.

"Obviously it's a compromise to what the ideal private instruction scenario would be," Arden said. Children completing three years of the program will be "about where a child would be after one year of private instruction," he said.

Arden said he planned for a wide spectrum of students by making sure the program offered more than "just old, white European composers" and endowing its characters with ethnic variety.

Along with Bayside, pilot projects have begun at 10 schools in eastern Canada, one in Connecticut and one in Los Angeles, Mullen said.

Arden, whose foundation raised $75,000 over five years to help launch the program, has enlisted James Catterall, an arts education researcher at UCLA, to evaluate results of the test programs.

Set to begin after the first year of the program, his evaluation will look at whether children gained musical skills and will measure their scores on standardized tests against those who did not participate in the pilot, Arden said.

"The extra-musical results are important because they provide a rationale for schools to offer this kind of training," he said, noting that most public schools must agonize over every new expense.

With a one-time cost of about $4,000 to equip a school with keyboards, software and support, Arden believes demand will reach a crescendo that Keys to Achievement will be hard-pressed to meet.

He plans a fund-raising program to subsidize placing the package in schools where children typically don't have access to piano lessons.

For the moment, Keys to Achievement has no paid staff. Its budget amounts to "whatever I can throw into it," said Arden, 55. "I could be spending thousands of dollars a year easily," said Arden, who sets up the keyboards twice a week at Bayside and then packs them up again after the lessons.

At Bayside, the program appears to have met the goal of bringing smiles.

"I think it's great, because when I listen, I hear songs that I like. And it has lots of animals in it," kindergartner Coral Kiefer said.

"It's fun," said Sparkle. "I like the game where you play the keys to catch coconuts in the water."

"We'll do anything for literacy and the arts," Bayside Principal Ruby Sullivan Wilson said. "This is an easy 'yes' for us."